An Evaluation of the Employment of Cross-referencing in Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (2001)

Abstract

The present article examines how cross-referencing was employed in Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (henceforth: ISN) (2001). ISN is the first and the only Zimbabwean Ndebele monolingual general-purpose dictionary. In light of this, a lot of work lies ahead in terms of dictionary making in Zimbabwean Ndebele. Reviews of this pioneering work will go a long way in improving the compilation of future Zimbabwean Ndebele dictionaries, from the viewpoint of the user-oriented approach. Findings of the study reveal that cross-referencing was employed in headword selection and definitions in view of synonyms and variants. It emerged that in some cases, cross-referencing was not effectively employed, and this led to the wastage of the much needed space in the dictionary, and inevitably compromised the dictionary’s user-friendliness and accessibility. This also resulted in the failure to satisfy user-needs and userperspectives. An in-depth analysis of ISN and interactions with the participants of the study showed that, to some extent, cases of bad cross-referencing, especially dead cross-referencing and repetition of definitions can be attributed to lack of thorough editing of the dictionary and the corpus-aided approach employed to compile ISN among other things.